Learn Inbound is a fantastic annual event held at the Aviva in Dublin, which covers the spectrum of digital marketing. It was great to attend an event that had as much love for email or research, as it did for SEO outreach.
We have to thank Mark for inviting us, as we learnt SO much that we’re now applying to our clients…. everyday’s a school day!
The Talks
The two day track explored a wide spectrum of topics from international speakers – some we’d seen before and love, others were new to us… but gosh did they know their stuff! We also have to give a shout out to Andi from Eximo Marketing for his wonderful MC skills and terrible throwing skills….
The Google Analytics Mixed Tape of Content Reporting Happiness from The Coloring In Department
Jill Quick
The Coloring in Department
The Google Analytics Mixed Tape of Content Reporting Happiness
Jill’s talk focused on the analogy of Google Analytics as a Mix Tape and how there’s a variety of different things we can do with Analytics… a lot of which people aren’t doing.
Jill delved into Goal and Event tracking (please set these up as a basic guys!), using Multi-Channel Funnels and Assisted Conversions to really show the value of marketing and also introduced many to Content Grouping. Content Grouping is effectively a way to segment your pages, allowing you to get a deeper understanding of their performance.
Combine those segments with Data Studio and you really are winning!
Lianna Patch
Punchline Conversion Copywriting
How to Be Funny (Even If You’re Not): Comedy-Inspired Copywriting Tips Lianna’s talk focused on how to successfully add humour to your copy – whether this is on-site, email marketing or social etc. She’s kindly summed it up in a video… saving us a bunch of typing.
Els Aerts
AGConsult
The Lost Art Of Asking Questions 
Els has such a fantastic viewpoint on user feedback and quality user research…. it starts with picking the right people to speak with and asking the right kind of questions.
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of adding bias to your questions, that’s not going to get your quality responses.
Consider where your audience are in their journey and hit them with the most relevant questions – post booking you can ask for feedback on whether they found what they were looking for and the booking process. On entry, you can enquire as to why the user is here….. there’s a time and a place for each type of survey, you just need to test what works for you.
Ross Simmonds
Foundation Marketing
Keywords Aren’t Enough – How To Undercover Content Ideas Worth Chasing.
This deck had Where’s Wally in it so we were sold…. but in all seriousness Ross has some awesome suggestson content research that go far beyond Adwords Keyword Planner and Answer The Public.
From use Quora’s ad platform, Q&A forums, to filtering sub-Reddits, your strategy should focus on Research, Rethink and Remix..
Alexa Hubley
CXL Institute
How To Stand Out In A Saturated Market
We’re leaving the dancing bacon here with no context, you need to check out Alexa’s slides to understand.
Alexa gave a fantastic framework for taking products to market, that’ll save you a lot of the bumps and questions along the way… it’s the framework they’ve successfully used themselves… so you know it’s good!
She also focused on product marketing and branding strategies that can really help you to stand out, without the need for big bucks….. a lot of it comes down to personality and personalisation.
Want to know more?
Claire Suellentrop
Forget The Funnel
Rethinking “Personas” — Create Higher-Converting Campaigns Using Jobs To Be Done We’d not heard of the Jobs To Be Done framework before (and now we feel silly as it makes so much sense!). The framework is used to reveal your customers’ true motivations. Why did they buy from you? Why do they use your product? This in turn should then be used as a basis for your personas and how you’re targeting your audience. Don’t just rely on basic persona info about where your customers hang out and what they may watch, like these guys did…
Ross Hudgens
Siege Media
Scaleable Content Marketing Lessons: Generating 5,000+ Links Within 12 Months
Ross’s talk was a fantastic insight into what his team had done to achieve such top notch links within the last year. The most important aspects really are design and making your asset stronger than what already exists: this could be visual or as simple as doing a bigger and better guide.
Research the audience you’re targeting and understand what they enjoy – is it guides, statistics, humour, assets? Then build your campaign around this to ensure linking success.
There’s even more talks from the event below:
Joel Kettle – Case Study Buddy
Stories That Sell: How To Create Case Studies That’ll Make Your Filthy Rich
Val Geisler – ValGeisler.com
Specialisation as a Sustainable Business Tactic
Nadya Khoja – Venngage
Growth by Content: Driving Massive Traffic Without a Big Budget
Helen Pollitt – Avenue Digital
Ten Minutes That Will Change Your Reporting For Good
James Brockbank – Digitaloft
How To Turn Brand Mentions Into Links
April Dunford – Ambient Strategy
Positioning: How To Harness An Inbound Marketing Secret Weapon
Dennis Yu – BlitzMetrics
Irina Nica – HubSpot
Scaling Links To Lead Gen Content: The Prospecting Approach That Guarantees Results
David White – Edit
Using Social Media To Build Better Campaigns and Better Links
Shannon McGuirk – Aira
How To Supercharge Link Building With A Digital PR Newsroom
Jessica Best – Barkley
The Good, the Bad, and the WOW: What Works in Email Marketing in 2019
Elizabeth Knights-Ward – LinkedIn
Championing Trends in B2B To Close The Gap Between Sales & Marketing
Judith Lewis – DeCabbit Consultancy
SEO is Dead Again? It Will Never Die
Kirk Williams
Zato
I Don’t Know How to Run Shopping Ads, and At This Point I’m Too Afraid To Ask First of all Kirk had branded sneakers on which makes him awesome, but his talk broke down Shopping right down to the basics which we often overlook. From ensuring your feed was set up correctly to actually breaking down your campaigns during creations…. the more specific the lower the CPC guys – it was a stark reminder of just how valuable Shopping is as a marketing channel. 
Alan Coleman & Beth Quigley
Wolfgang Digital
How To Outmarket Your Competition in The AI Era This talk got us wanting to go and build an army of Wall-Es to manage all our PPC. We know that Google is moving more and more towards automation and as a result of that we’re losing control, so we need to get smarter. 
By layering the data we have (which Google doesn’t) we can make better decisions with our campaigns and budget!
Baby Groot’s Guide to Rockin’ Local SEO from Greg Gifford
Greg Gifford
Wikimotive
Baby Groot’s Guide To Rockin’ Local SEO First of all you need to check Greg’s twitter for a full live-tweet run down of Learn Inbound….. In his talk though Greg his on how to dominate local seo from map pack ranking factors, to entity based search, the importance of reviews and so much more. This talk literally gives you a to-do list to come away with… top of that list for all of us is to get our Google My Business listings in order, as as Greg says, this is basically now our homepage. AND…. don’t forget to UTM track your links on GMB so that you can track the traffic correctly in Google Analytics.
Cindy Krum
MobileMoxie
The Secrets Your Analytics Won’t Tell You About Mobile-First Indexing This deck had an ostrich theme, what’s not to like? But Cindy hit on some real home truths about mobile and how the actual SERPs really don’t work for blue link (organic results) anymore.
On a mobile device we have to scroll past ads, map packs, snippets and people also ask boxes before we even get to organic results – this could easily be four/five scrolls…. so we need to change our tact and focus on getting featured in these other Google entities to win at mobile traffic.
Robin Lord
Distilled
Whatever You Do, Put Billboards in Manchester: Getting Brand Data From Google
Robin 100% wins the award for best slide of the event…. we love a pun.
More importantly though Robin wants us tot focus on the bigger picture and use widely-available data to compare territory-level brand awareness between our brand and competitors. This information can then be used with all our marketing channels to create an informed strategy rather than guesswork….. stopping you wanting to “turn back time”… too much?
Sam Marsden
DeepCrawl
Overcoming Technical SEO Challenges For Enterprise Sites
We’ve heard Sam speak a few times now and every time we’re furiously taking notes – we fully credit him for helping us to understand Data Studio!
In this talk, Sam focused on the common problems we face in enterprise businesses and how to overcome them: from getting your audits implemented, to reporting and just how strong the competition is.
Using a sample to show the bigger picture can help to overcome resource; giving a hierarchy of tasks can make them seem more bitesize; dashboards are fantastic for reporting and being personable and focusing on your soft skills will help you get sign off quicker.
Overcoming Technical SEO Challenges for Enterprise Sites – LearnInbound 2019 from Sam Marsden
Latest Blogs
Beginners Guide to Canonicalisation and URL SEO
In the multifaceted industry of digital marketing, there’s a vital concept called Canonicalisation – often overlooked but crucial for a…
Understanding and Implementing URL Redirects
The digital landscape is vast and complex, making URL redirection pivotal in ensuring users and search engines seamlessly transition to…
How Important is it to Get Your Site Architecture Right?
In the vast digital landscape, your website is more than just a virtual storefront – it’s a dynamic entity that…
Top Tips for Extracting Data from Google Search Console
In the hyper-competitive digital marketing landscape, understanding your audience’s preferences, analysing website traffic sources, and addressing technical SEO issues are…
What Are Core Web Vitals And How Can You Improve Yours?
What are core web vitals? Core web vitals are a set of user-centric metrics that assess particular aspects of user…
How to create a WordPress website
Would you like to create a website for your business or yourself? Is the thought of hiring developers and hosting…